I'm not totally sure why you'd want to, but you can now give freev in its current state a spin. There is no gameplay to speak of for now; you are invited, however, to fly around in an infinite expanse of crudely rendered stars.

It has been some time. Imagine my surprise at reading the changelogs and seeing "three years ago" next to some most recent commits. Fantastic!

I've gotten restless for a project (with no good reason — things are busy enough), so I've rewritten freev from scratch to use a new framework I'm writing in parallel called FVSprites. FVSprites provides an abstracted Cocoa interface for drawing simple 2D animations with OpenGL. Imagine the potential! Imagine the ridiculous sysreqs for a 2D game!

We'll see how this progresses over the next few weeks. It's functional, though (in the sense that flying a garish little ship around and doing nothing is functional): I invite you to svn checkout the code and give it a spin.

The drawing engine is now much more complete, but it is still just a drawing engine. On my TiBook/800, I consistently get framerates of 100 fps or more (that is, of course, with only two ships and a planet). Model structure is now complete enough to begin more gameplay-oriented features. Please check out the latest via anonymous CVS.

Just a short note on what we'll most probably end up doing and in what order.

freev is currently designated Pre-Alpha (p). It will most likely remain that way until we have all the basic, non-networked features implemented to our satisfaction (ie, much like Ambrosia's EV, but with no content like storylines, meaningful systems, etc).

At this point Alpha (a) stage will commence. We'll stay Alpha until we're major-feature-complete. Basically, that means the MMORPG elements will be in place.

Next is Beta (b). Beta stage will be for squashing bugs and becoming fully feature-complete.

When that happens (and we think we're ready to release), we'll put out a Final Candidate (F). At this point, we'll be ready for testing en masse, and only when we're really sure that we're quite bugless will we go 1.0.

Also, the CVS repository here at SourceForge has the latest version of the code I've written so far. It currently is a graphics engine for flying (and should be relatively fast). This is currently the only way to get freev. Get the source by using anonymous pserver acces to cvs.freev.sf.net/cvsroot/freev.

If you'd like to help, please just email me with your username on SourceForge and you'll be blessed as a Developer. As I understand, you'll get write access to the CVS repository, be able to post to this news, and other good stuff. My email is adrian at pygmysoftware dot com.